Casualty Evacuation Helicopters: Reevaluating the Role of the Dustoff in the Vietnam War

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If we break this down still further, it is not difficult to understand that only some 70 to 80 helicopters might be available for military use within each corps area. This might translate into only one or two dozen per division. Lifting a single infantry company might normally require some 16 to 20 helicopters, depending on fuel load. Those choppers were supplemented by the necessary accompaniment of gunships, command ships and associated heavy-lift support–or indeed the continuing routine requirement for logistic backup throughout the Army. So by definition, there can rarely have been very many surplus helicopters available for medevac purposes. As Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (then the lieutenant colonel commanding the lead battalion) later reported on the start of the November 1965 Ia Drang battle, ‘my main concern focused on the fact that we would have only sixteen Huey slicks to ferry the battalion into the assault area… .What that meant was that fewer than eighty men–not even one full company–would hit the landing zone in the first wave… .’ (In the face of three whole enemy battalions!)

Then again, in December 1969, Lieutenant Michael Lee Lanning experienced a nerve-wracking wait when only three helicopters could be made available to lift his company out of the scene of a bloody battle. ‘We would have to be extracted in three separate lifts,’ he recalled. ‘Turnaround time between each sortie would be about thirty minutes. That meant that before the last group could be picked up, any lingering dinks would have an hour to plan an attack on the remaining eighteen men.’ All in all, we must conclude that despite the apparently plentiful supply of helicopters available to the U.S. forces in Vietnam, they were still always a relatively rare resource that needed to be managed and husbanded very carefully.

The dustoff suffered from a particular difficulty that has been common to all front-line ambulances throughout history. It was designed to rescue wounded soldiers from as near as possible to the time and place they were wounded–which by definition would add up to an especially dangerous situation. The dustoff had to fly right into the heart of the battle zone and pluck out shocked, suffering, bleeding and badly damaged combatants who might still be under heavy fire. Yet the medical crew also had to make sure that they themselves managed to survive such fire, so that their rescued casualty could be removed safely to an aid station in the rear.

That made for some urgent personal dilemmas. As one crewman recalled in Moore and Joseph C. Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: ‘The NVA were in the wood line shooting at the helicopter. The medevac pilot kind of froze up on us and was having trouble setting the ship down. We never did come to a complete hover. All aboard had to dive out on the ground from about six feet up in the air. We ran in a crouch.’

On some occasions the infantry had particularly bad experiences with dustoff crews. William Shucart reported of the Ia Drang battle: ‘We were trying to get the medevac ships to come in but they would not. A couple of Huey slicks came down but we were taking fire and the medevacs wouldn’t come. When you are taking fire is precisely when you need medevac. I don’t know where those guys got their great reputations. I was totally dismayed with the medevac guys. The Huey slick crews were terrific.’

Obviously, there was always a serious conflict of interest inherent in the whole business of medevac. On one side, the dustoff crews had to ignore the tactical dangers and go in regardless, and in fact many of them were often among the bravest men to be found anywhere in the military. Yet, on the other hand, they had to carefully calculate their risks and make sure that conditions were relatively safe, or at least safe enough. Otherwise, they would be certain to lose the wounded men they were evacuating as well as their own lives.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Airborne Operations, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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